So this, I assume, is the part where they say to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and carry on.
This is the part where someone gives me the "plenty of fish in the sea," and all that. Spend a few days or weeks watching sad movies, listening to sad songs, binging on terrible food, and lock yourself away and grieve. This is there part where I'm supposed to call up some friends who can surround me and tell me how victimized I was and assure me of how bad of a person - and therefore a fit - she is. Where we go back and relive it all and pile on all the bad stuff and trivialize all the good. This is where I Google inspirational quotes and pictures and memes and sew them onto my heart as a temporary personal slogan to live by - at least until the sutures heal.
And this, eventually, is where I'm supposed to start tempering the sting of loneliness by thinking outside the box and focus on learning and extracting wisdom for the future instead of simmering in doubts, regret, and painful imaginations.
But I don't feel that.
I don't feel sad. I mean, I know I am sad. But it's... more than that.
Something broke this time.
I'm supposed to take solace in trying hard, subscribing to the theory that, "If you gave it your best shot and left it all out on the field, you have nothing to be ashamed of." Which I can see how it could be an alluring philosophy. Except that it also proves one agonizing fact:
Your best wasn't good enough.
100% of everything you have didn't meet the requirements. You were doomed from the start. Every ounce of patience, logic, and salt in your body was a lost cause. Every time you tried "just one more time," and gave her "just one more chance," and every moment you laughed in bed, on the carpet, with her in your lap, sitting by the sidewalk eating lunch, eating breakfast by the pool, cuddling in the car, walking hand-in-hand around the city... every wonderful moment will end up meaning nothing. Because I wasn't enough. Or I came around at the wrong time. Or she was just in a weird place. Or any other reason.
That's a fairly awful sensation. Not a fan.
But these days and moments will fade into a haze of memories... first the little ones will go... the winks and smirks and middle of the night cuddles...
Then the inside jokes will be forgotten... the clever ones, the perfectly timed jabs, the endless puns, the ones that will never make any sense to anyone else but us...
Then the words and voices will dissolve and we'll forget what the other sounds like over the years... but strangely, not the laugh...
And then the dates and moments and lunches and evenings spent making love, watching movies, going to the park at night, driving around, the showers, the kisses, the mornings next to each other in the bathroom mirror, the trips to the market, the wine, the sex... the sex...
Until finally, one day, all we will be to each other is a chapter in each other's story. Something that gets encapsulated into an quick anecdote that starts with an, "There was this guy," and ends with, "I wonder..."
But I didn't want her to just end up being a story. I didn't want her to be a lesson. I didn't want her to be relegated to a simple cautionary tale that I share with some friends years from now or end up being a sit-down conversation with the girl I'm explaining my past to.
I just wanted her.
Very simple. Very pure. Very true.
No one's perfect. She wasn't. She isn't. I'm not. Nor did I ever expect her to be. I love who she is. Everyone has a past and baggage full of mistakes and wishful mulligans. But with her, for the first time in my life with anyone, I acknowledged my past with her in full disclosure - and it allowed me to not only accept the things I cannot change but also to accept what we were and gave me the desire to move forward; It was refreshingly liberating. By opening up and letting go of the burden of my past, the weight was suddenly gone, and I wanted to take her hand and fly.
Forward.
But she couldn't stop looking back. She couldn't stop going over things ended before with her ex. Even going so far as to not even really end it, but to keep in contact with him, go to dinner with him, call and text him, argue with him, and...
And I fear it has ultimately sank us both.
There's an engine in both of us that draws us to each other, like magnets. It's wonderful and frustrating and - given the proper circumstance - is something absolutely amazing. But it requires confidence
